Video Transcript

Optimizing a Project.

To optimize a project in Storyboard Pro, go to the File menu at the top. And from the menu, select Optimize Project. The Optimize Project dialog box appears with three options. So the first one is Remove unused elements from the project. So while you're creating a project, you're often deleting layers and panels, updating drawings, and unlinking sounds. All of these operations create backups in your file, which take up space and increase the file size of your project on your hard drive.

So by selecting Remove unused elements from the project, what you'll essentially be doing is removing these unwanted backup files for elements that no longer exist. Second option is Flatten all drawings in the project. So to show you what this does, I'm going to cancel this operation for a minute. And then I'm going to go to a panel where there is a drawing. And with the select tool selected, I'm going to select some of the strokes. And actually, let's zoom in to see that.

So if you see here, every single stroke is actually an individual stroke that can still be edited on its own. And I can use the Contour Editor Tool as well to further that example. However, if you select the option Flatten drawings in the project, what essentially is done is this. So now, this whole drawing is not a bunch of different strokes, it's actually a single stroke. And let's zoom in again to see that. So with the Select Tool selected, I can only move it around as a single object. And with the Contour Editor Tool selected, you can see it's also considered a single object.

So the advantage to this is that it makes your file size lighter because the software doesn't have to calculate the position of a bunch of different strokes. However, the disadvantage is that you're not able to edit the individual strokes of this drawing. And this option works for both pencil and brush strokes. However, it does not flatten strokes of different colors layered on top of one another.

So if we bring up the window again, we have one more option here, which is Reduce texture resolution of all drawings in the project. So what this does is reduce the resolution of textured lines and fills. It never reduces them below 72 DPI. However, once you select this, it is not undoable. You cannot use the Ctrl+Z or Cmd+Z to undo this operation. And actually, that message is said right here at the bottom for all of these operations. Those operations are not undoable and we'll empty the undo list and, also, that it might take a few minutes. So let's select OK. And we can see that the progress bar at the top is flattening the drawings and then optimizing the project. And we can see that our operation has successfully been completed.

So now if we go to Finder and go to where our project file is stored and right-click on it and go to Get Info, I can tell you that this project was about 756 megs before, and now, it's about 722. So you can see that optimizing the project reduced the project size by more than 30 megs.